


Né Pour Te Connaître

by nimueailinen, yet_intrepid



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Gen, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-06-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 04:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimueailinen/pseuds/nimueailinen, https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>November, 1943: Three years after the Germans marched into Paris, Grantaire is surviving the Occupation by drinking black market alcohol and trying to stay out of trouble, but his life is turned upside-down when he becomes entangled with a group of young Resistance members, including a laughing girl who jumps out of windows and a man whose blazing eyes convince him to do things he might not live to regret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Des Rires Dans la Rue

  
_To commit to a righteous cause in the face of extreme circumstances is absurd.  To not commit to a righteous cause in the face of extreme circumstances is also absurd.  However, only one choice offers the opportunity for human dignity._

_\- Albert Camus_

 

**November, 1943**

Afterwards, Grantaire would blame the alcohol.

If he hadn’t been trying to buy alcohol, he would never have gone to M. Thenardier, who had made him wait for close to an hour before bothering to mention that he was expecting a raid in the next few days and had hidden most of his stash with his lackeys. If he hadn’t gone to Thenardier, the man would never have sent him to talk to Montparnasse, who was notoriously difficult to find at the best of times and enjoyed making people wait even more than his employer did. If he hadn’t been looking for Montparnasse, he wouldn’t have had to dodge an unexpected patrol walking by the Hôtel de Ville, and if he hadn’t _found_ Montparnasse, he wouldn’t have had to wait for another hour before handing over an exorbitantly high sum of money for a ridiculously small bottle of brandy. In short, if he hadn’t been trying to buy alcohol, he would never have found himself standing on the Boulevard St. Michel that evening, with fifteen minutes to curfew and twenty minutes away from home.

Twenty minutes away from home, and with brandy strong on his breath and a half-full bottle in the pocket of his coat, he couldn’t afford to risk running into the police. Main streets were out of the question, then - he would have to go by the maze of tiny streets and alleyways, and hopefully cut a few minutes off his trip in the process.

Even the back streets were crowded, with people hurrying to last-minute errands or heading back to their homes, but Grantaire made good time, cutting through the narrow alleys between buildings and cheerfully elbowing his way through the occasional press of people. As he turned onto another near-empty street, seven blocks from home and with three minutes still to go, he couldn’t help but think that he might make it after all... and then there was a noise like breaking glass and something slammed into him from above, knocking him clean off his feet.

For half a second, as he lay sprawled on the street, Grantaire thought that perhaps God did exist, and had finally decided to strike him down for years of casual blasphemy, drinking, and really bad puns. But while it had been a very long time since he’d read any Scripture, he didn’t seem to recall the instrument of divine vengeance ever being described as a laughing brunette in stocking feet, with a green scarf pulled haphazardly over the lower half of her face and shards of glass gleaming in her hair.

“I’m terribly sorry about that, monsieur,” she said, bouncing to her feet like it was something she did every day. “Are you alright?”

“What? Yes, I’m fine, are _you_ alright?” Grantaire asked, more out of habit than any real concern. (He felt that he couldn’t really be blamed for falling back on stupid pleasantries - women didn’t usually fall on him at all, and certainly never out of second-story windows.)

The woman laughed. “Oh, I’m fine, that happens all the time. And listen, it was nice running into you, I’d love to stay and talk, but I _really_ have to run, so goodbye!” With that, she went racing off down a side street, yelling “Vive la France!” as she disappeared.

Grantaire sat on the pavement staring after her for a full thirty seconds before it occurred to him who she had probably been running away from, and that it would probably be better if he wasn’t still sitting there when they reached him. He got gingerly to his feet, checked his bottle (miraculously still intact in his pocket), and was just brushing the broken glass off his shoulders when two policemen burst onto the street and headed straight for him.

“We’re looking for a woman,” one said, without preamble. “About this tall, auburn hair, jumped out a window two minutes ago. Do you know which way she went?”  Grantaire shrugged, looking them over. He had no particular grudge against the Parisian police, but he didn’t see much of a reason to cooperate with them, either.

“Sure,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder towards where the quiet street opened onto the much busier Rue de Vaugirard, “she went that way.”

As the police went running off in nearly the opposite direction as the woman, Grantaire stared around the street, almost waiting for another strange thing to happen. Nothing was forthcoming, though, so he quickly brushed himself off, shrugged at the world, and resumed his journey home.

* * *

 

By all rights, that ought to have been the end of it. Perhaps it would have been, too, except that two days later, Grantaire - unfortunately sober and killing time in a café near the Sorbonne - looked up from his drink just as a familiar figure slipped through the door. She looked far more composed than she had the last time he had seen her, but it was without a doubt the same girl who had fallen on top of him near the Rue de Vaugirard.

She went straight to the back of the café without so much as looking in his direction, so Grantaire chalked it up to a strange coincidence, and went back to idly watching the people passing by. He had only been doing this for two or three minutes when a man in a bowler hat and thoroughly nondescript suit walked in front of the window. To anyone else, he would have been completely unremarkable, but Grantaire had a knack for faces, and had also been sitting in the café for three hours, and the man had been very nonchalantly walking past the window every fifteen minutes for the last hour and a half.

Grantaire hadn’t particularly cared what the man was doing, and would honestly have preferred to continue not to care, but when the man stopped dead in front of the window, glanced in, and promptly turned around and hurried back the way he had come, several things fell rather uncomfortably into place. He was some sort of lookout, that much was painfully obvious, and whatever he was looking out for had clearly arrived... Grantaire glanced towards the back of the mostly empty café and immediately spotted the girl from before, absorbed in quiet conversation with a bespectacled man. He would bet half his savings that they were the people the man in the hat had been watching for, and the remaining half that things were not going to end well for the two of them, and _he should not get involved_.

He really, _really_ should not get involved. It was absolutely none of his business, and anyway, interfering with the police - and it _had_ to be the police, if not the Milice or the Gestapo - was never a good idea. Pointing a couple of policemen in the wrong direction was one thing, but warning someone that they were being watched was something else entirely, and Grantaire had heard the whispers of what happened to the people who helped someone under surveillance, enough to know that the only safe thing to do was to stay out of the way entirely.

But he was almost painfully sober, and without the comforting fog of alcohol clouding his mind, there was no way for Grantaire to avoid the realization that followed on the heels of his last thought: _if even warning them might end badly, what would happen to the people who were actually being watched?_

Maybe it was none of his business, but she was so vibrant, and so beautiful, and even to Grantaire’s cynical mind, it seemed cosmically unfair that someone who had escaped the law by jumping out of a window should be arrested while having a conversation in a little café off the Rue Mouffetard.

_So much for not getting involved._

The girl’s companion was the first to notice his approach, and he fell silent immediately, watching Grantaire out of the corner of his eye. The girl, who had her back to the door, only looked up when Grantaire dropped into a nearby chair, and immediately did a double take.

“Pardon me, but didn’t I land on you the other day?” she asked.

“Small world, isn’t it?” She grinned at that. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re up to, and I don’t _want_ to know, but are you expecting company? Because if you’re not, you should know that somebody knows you’re here and he ran off as soon as he saw you, which seems pretty ominous to me.”

The smile fell off her face at once, and for a long moment she neither spoke nor moved, but simply studied his face intently. Grantaire, who did not feel as if he looked much like an honest, upright sort of person at the best of times, shifted uncomfortably under the scrutiny, but whatever she saw must have persuaded her, and she glanced at her companion with a nod. He jumped to his feet.

“Back exit?”

“Through the kitchen,” she said. “The staff shouldn’t give you any problems. I’ll follow you in a minute. _Be careful_.”

“Same to you,” he said, then nodded to Grantaire and hurried through the kitchen door. The woman turned back to Grantaire, a strangely considering look on her face.

“That’s twice you’ve helped me out,” she said as she tugged on her coat. “What’s your name, anyway?”

“Grantaire,” Grantaire said, before he could think better of it, and then, having thought better of it, “What’s yours?”

She only laughed, looking utterly delighted, kissed him on both cheeks, and sashayed away before he could say another word, leaving him to stare dumbstruck after her for the second time in as many days.

When a small group of men burst through the door a few minutes later, they found a nearly deserted room, a few bills thrown hastily on one of the tables, and Grantaire, slouched comfortably in his chair, trying very eloquently to persuade the waitress to bring him some wine. It had been a very odd week, after all. He deserved it.

* * *

 

On Tuesday, it rained all afternoon, a freezing, gray downpour that sent everyone on the streets running for shelter. A few hours into the deluge, Grantaire walked out of his lecture hall, glared at the sky with the longsuffering air of one who has forgotten his umbrella _again,_ and bitterly regretted deciding to attend his classes that day.

Walking back to his apartment was clearly out of the question. Grantaire briefly considered taking the Metro, but that would involve walking through the rain, and there was really no reason to endure that when he could take one of the taxis lined up outside the school instead.

He had just settled into the back of one and given the driver his address when the door was thrown open and a voice said, “Place de la Bastille, please,” and then, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t...” Grantaire, who had recognized the voice at once, waved at the woman as she turned to face him.

“Ha,” she said, “this is a nice coincidence. Should I get another taxi?”

Grantaire didn’t much care, and said so, and was not the least bit surprised when she shut the door behind her and waved at the driver to go ahead. She had evidently had to run through the rain, as she looked rather bedraggled and incredibly put out by this, and they passed a few minutes in silence as she pouted at her reflection in the rearview mirror and tried valiantly to pretend she wasn’t hiding something under her coat.

Eventually Grantaire, who had been sitting quietly and trying to prepare for the inevitable explosion of chaos, sighed and said, “Alright, if we’re going to keep running into each other this way, I really have to call you something besides Crazy Girl Who Jumps Out Windows. You have _got_ a name, haven’t you?”

She positively beamed at him. “Of course I’ve got a name,” she said, “everyone’s got a name, that would be ridiculous. But listen, I’m glad I ran into you, I actually wanted to ask you something.”

 _Oh dear,_ Grantaire thought, but couldn’t keep from saying, “Go on...”

“You’ve been so kind as to give me a hand twice... well, three times, now, and after the last time we met I asked around about you-”

“ _What?_ ”

“Calm down, you look like you’re going to pop something. Anyway, I asked around, and what I heard was interesting - not in a bad way, honestly, stop looking at me like that - so I was wondering if you might have any interest in attending a meeting.”

A very large part of Grantaire wanted to say “no” then and there, and he opened his mouth to do so, only to find himself saying, “What _sort_ of meeting?” instead. _Well, at least I sounded properly skeptical._

The woman looked up at the taxi driver, who was completely ignoring them, and leaned towards Grantaire, speaking in a tone that was only barely above a whisper.

“Nothing interesting, really, just a small group of friends who occasionally get together and exchange ideas on how to better France. It’s all very innocent, and I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”

Grantaire said nothing, but the woman was undeterred.

“I’m sure you’ll want to think about it, of course, but if you’re interested, I’ll be at the north end of the Bois de Boulogne at five o’clock this Friday. You can meet me there, but some of my friends don’t like strangers, so make sure you don’t bring anyone else along. And I’m always very punctual, so if I’m more than five minutes late, you should just assume I’m not coming - oh, and I think this is where you were going?”

The taxi had indeed stopped in front of Grantaire’s apartment building, and the driver was pointedly drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. It was only as he stepped out into the rain that Grantaire realized something.

“You never answered my question - what’s your name?”

She peered up at him and flashed a devastatingly sweet smile. “Come to the Bois de Boulogne on Friday, and you’ll find out.” That seemed incredibly unfair, but before Grantaire could complain, she winked, shut the door, and left him standing in the rain and more confused than ever. As the taxi pulled away from the curb, it looked almost as if she was laughing at him.

* * *

 

At 4 o’clock, Grantaire was sure he wasn’t going to go. He had given the matter some thought, in between trying to suck the last drops of liquor out of a bottle, and come to the conclusion that any group that caused someone to have to flee arrest three times in the span of a week was not a group that he wanted to be a part of. If the group in question was actually the Resistance - and if it w _asn’t_ the Resistance, Grantaire would give up drinking forever - then it was in his best interest to stay far, far away. He had no desire to get involved in a shadowy movement that only the most naive of idealists believed would change a thing. Living under German rule was awful, true, but he was still _alive_ , and he had every intention of staying that way - and the three years of occupation had taught him that the best way of doing that didn’t involve following pretty girls to clandestine and likely-illegal meetings. So no, he wouldn’t be going to the Bois de Boulogne. He was quite certain about that.

There was no reasonable explanation, then, for why 5:03 found him loitering on a bench outside the Bois de Boulogne, trying to check his watch and glance around without looking suspicious. The woman had said to wait for five minutes before leaving, and with only two minutes left on the clock, there was still no sign of her on the busy street.

 _She must have changed her mind,_ he thought, and did not know why he suddenly found himself unable to consider the alternative. Only, she had seemed so alive the last time he’d seen her, laughing at him through the rain and the taxi window... _She’s realized I would make a terrible recruit and decided to stay home instead._

The thought had barely entered his head when a petite figure slipped up next to him, and Grantaire found his cheeks being kissed with a sort of cheerful familiarity that he was not at all used to.

“Oh, good, you _did_ come,” she said, pulling away.

Grantaire barely managed to repress a double-take. It was the same woman, there was no doubt of that, but sometime in the last few days she had been transformed from vibrant to something very near subdued. She was paler than before, with dark circles that her makeup failed to hide below red-rimmed eyes, and under her fashionable hat her hair looked as if it might be going limp. In a sober grey dress, she looked like any other woman in Paris - and nothing at all like the girl who had jumped out of a window and laughed about it.

“You look _terrible_ ,” Grantaire said, before he could think better of it, and that pulled a weak laugh out of her.

“Flatterer.” She slipped a hand through his arm and tugged him up and towards the street. “Now come on, we’re going to be late.”

A few minutes later, as the woman guided them down yet another side street, Grantaire suddenly began to feel as if they were being followed. Before he could so much as mention his fears, though, they were suddenly confirmed, as someone - a kid, judging by the height - ran up on the woman’s other side and peered suspiciously around at him.

“He’s new,” the kid said, in tones of deep skepticism.

The woman smiled. “Hopefully.”

There was a pause as they turned onto a deserted street, and then the kid let out a long, low whistle. “You’ve got the worst timing _ever,_ you know that?”

“It wasn’t intentional!”

“Yeah, well, I think I’m just gonna wait out here for a bit anyway. Just to be safe.” He darted a few steps ahead, threw a lazy salute and a half-mocking “good luck!” over his shoulder, dove into the opening of an alleyway, and was gone.

Grantaire opened his mouth to ask the woman just what exactly the kid had meant by _that_ , but she had pulled up short and was looking around suspiciously. After a few moments, she glanced up at him and nodded.

“Wait here for a minute,” she said, and hurried down a flight of stairs that Grantaire had barely even noticed, calling over her shoulder, “and if anyone comes by, act casual!”

“Right,” Grantaire muttered, leaning against the wall next to the stairs and wondering if it was too late to just turn around and leave. _I knew I shouldn’t have come..._

An elaborate pattern of knocks echoed up from the foot of the stairs, followed by a brief scuffling sound and an unfamiliar voice asking quietly, “Who is it?”

“Courfeyrac,” came the soft reply. “And I brought a friend. He, um, wants to get some leather trousers to impress his girlfriend.”

“...you brought a friend?”

“Yes?” The woman - Courfeyrac - sounded confused. Grantaire wondered if she knew he could hear them. “I did tell you I was going to.”

There was a pause.

“E. says you didn’t.”

“Really?” Grantaire couldn’t see her, but it sounded like Courfeyrac was frowning. “Is he sure? I could have sworn I did.”

Another pause.

“C. agrees with E., and nobody else remembers you mentioning someone new.”

Courfeyrac sighed. “Damn. It must have slipped my mind, what with... well, anyway, I know the timing couldn’t be more terrible, but he _is_ trustworthy - I checked, you can ask J. - and now he knows this address, so can’t we at least let him in?”

In the silence that followed, Grantaire’s resolve, which had hardly existed in the first place, faded away entirely. He wasn’t cut out for things like this, all the cloak-and-dagger secrecy and danger, and besides, his life might not be worth much, but he was fairly attached to it all the same.

“Maybe I should just leave,” he said aloud, just as whoever was guarding the door said “Alright, bring him in.”

Courfeyrac, who must have run up the stairs the second she got the okay, gave him a reassuring smile and caught his hand.

“Don’t worry,” she said, misunderstanding. “That was my fault, you’ll be just fine. Now let’s get off the street before somebody comes this way.”

 _So much for leaving_ , Grantaire thought ruefully - perhaps there was someone in Paris able to tell Courfeyrac “no” to her face, but he certainly couldn’t. He went down the stairs instead, aware that he was doing something monumentally stupid and was probably going to get shot because of it, but helpless to resist following her through the open door.

Grantaire’s first impression of the room was that it was small, dimly lit, and filled with one of the wariest silences he had ever heard. There were six people looking back at him, and of the five he could see clearly, three were poised to grab guns.

“Everyone, this is Grantaire,” Courfeyrac said, dropping into a chair and leaving him standing in the middle of the room. “Please don’t shoot him, I like him.”

They all appeared to ignore her, but a second later, a woman sitting in the back of the room said, low and dangerous, “Do you recognize him?”

“No,” said the man Grantaire couldn’t see - he was in the darkest corner of the room, and half-hidden behind the bald man sitting next to him, but that had evidently not kept him from seeing Grantaire clearly enough. “He’s not one of theirs, you can relax.”

The tension in the room didn’t dissolve, but it eased noticeably at that, and the weapons disappeared, which, as far as Grantaire was concerned, was the most important point. And then one of the men looked up from putting his gun away and Grantaire felt his jaw drop.

He was - unnaturally beautiful was the first description that came to mind, followed by a whole host of others that were embarrassing enough to make Grantaire thankful, for the first time in his life, that he was sober. He was tall and blond and ridiculously attractive even by Parisian standards, and he was looking at Grantaire with an air of vague suspicion.

“I assume Courfeyrac’s told you who we are?”

Grantaire shrugged. “She hinted, and I guessed the rest of it - you’re with the Resistance, aren’t you?”

The other man inclined his head in what might have been a nod. “You know what we do, then.”

“I know you’ll get yourselves captured or killed fighting an enemy you can’t possibly hope to beat, if that’s what you mean,” Grantaire said, brutally honest, and immediately regretted the words when he saw Courfeyrac flinch. Some of the others muttered unhappily, but the blond was quiet, staring calmly up at him.

“It’s true,” he said at last, and the room fell silent. “We may all die before this war ends, yes, but you’re wrong about the rest of it. We can beat them. We _will_ beat them. And even if we couldn’t, we would fight them anyway, even if there was no chance at all, because there are some things that are worth dying for. If our deaths are necessary to overthrow this tyranny, then I will gladly give my life for the cause.”

He was on his feet, eyes blazing, and Grantaire was transfixed. He felt as if he could easily listen to this man speak for hours, and the blond looked perfectly willing to do just that, but before he could continue, the man sitting next to him reached out and laid a hand on his arm. He immediately turned to look at him, then nodded decisively, though neither man had said a word, and when he looked up at Grantaire again, his face was assessing.

“You have two options,” he said. “If you actually want to join us, you are welcome to do so. If you don’t, you can leave right now, and that will be the end of it - but know that if you try to report us to anyone, we will not hesitate to shoot you.”

Joining the Resistance was one of the _last_ things Grantaire wanted to do. He had an out, one last chance to walk away, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he should take it and never look back. It was the only smart option, and yet...

And yet that speech had been glorious. There had been something almost transcendent in the man’s perfect face, which was an absolutely ridiculous thing to think about someone who had just threatened to kill him without so much as blinking, but true nonetheless. Something in the stupidly idealistic man watching him from across the room had already sunk its claws into Grantaire’s chest, and he didn’t have a prayer of breaking free.

_What the hell. I’ve never made the smart choice before, there’s no sense in starting now._

“Alright,” he said, surprised by how steady his voice sounded. “Alright, I’m in.”

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to noviembre for speed-betaing this chapter!


	2. Au Nom des Hommes en Prison

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for brief mentions of rape and torture, and some discussion of suicide.

_Giving voice to consonants that rise_

_with no protection but each other’s ears._

_—Ilya Kaminsky_

Jehan Prouvaire stared at this new recruit who made the eighth member in their meeting, filling a place that ought not to have needed filling, and did not know what to say. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else, and silence lingered.

At last Courfeyrac clapped Grantaire on the shoulder. “Sit down then, why don’t you? Enjolras, I’ll report first. Our contact previously called Horace reports a code name change to Hucheloup. Our contact Burgon reports that she’ll now go by Gorbeau.”

Enjolras nodded. “And Gardener?”

“I didn’t go to him…didn’t you ask Marius to do that?”

“I thought I did, but I know that if I had, he would have reported.”

“Would have intended to report,” put in Bahorel from the back corner. The scowl she directed at the room, as she tugged at the kerchief over her dark hair, spoke of dangers, and Jehan winced. You must not give in to such thoughts, he told himself; that possibility has been there since the beginning and just because it feels closer now does not mean you can allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear—

Combeferre threw Bahorel a reproachful glance. “Marius does have a tendency to be absentminded, Enjolras,” he answered calmly. “Last meeting, he could hardly remember the passphrase, though he was the one to suggest it.”

“Oh,” said Jehan. The mention of the last meeting was enough to stir the memory and disentangle him from his thoughts. “You did ask him, Enjolras, but he came by here yesterday. Told me that he had far too much work to come to the meeting—if he doesn’t do it on time he won’t make his rent—and that Gardner has changed his code name to Fauvent.”

“Good.” The change in Enjolras’ face was subtle, but relief definitely showed. “We’ll need to make a new copy of the coded notes with the new names only. In fact, we’ll need a new code, at least for within the group. Any—any volunteers for that?”

“Why do we need volunteers,” began Bossuet, “isn’t that always—?” And then he paled, and said, “oh,” and seemed to become smaller in his chair as Joly put a hand on his shoulder.

Jehan did not dare volunteer. He was decent enough with codes, but he did not think he could stand to take over another’s work that way. He could imagine himself alone, bent over the papers, overwhelmed with grief, head pounding with worry…

And the rest, it seemed, agreed with him about the unpleasantness of the task.

“I’ll do it myself,” said Enjolras. “I was always his consultant on the matter; it is only fitting. Bahorel, did you ask Gavroche about a code name?”

“He refuses,” she said shortly.

“And Joly, what of Légume?”

“He’s going by Navet now,” Joly answered, when he had finished murmuring something to Bossuet.

“Very well,” said Enjolras. He took a steadying breath. “Now, Jehan. Have you thought any more about what we’re next putting out? Pamphlet or flyer?”

“Pamphlet, I think,” Jehan said. “Combeferre and I thought we’d do it together, a section each.”

Enjolras nodded. “And the specific content? We already did a flyer on Rayman’s actions, last month when the newspapers were covering Ritter’s death.”

Jehan glanced at Combeferre, who nodded encouragingly. “We—we’re going to go ahead and write on Himmler’s order that the Romani are to be considered on the same level as Jews and sent to the camps,” he said, getting it all out in a rush.

Enjolras blinked. “I thought—” he began.

“We know he was going to write it,” Combeferre said. “But now that he can’t, we think it still needs to be done—even besides the fact that he would certainly want it done.”

When Enjolras looked at him, Jehan felt all over again the weight of just how hard this was going to be—as hard as the codes, or maybe harder, for the subject was so important.

But—“Very well,” said Enjolras, and he smiled gravely at their courage. “Since Joly was able to provide us with that information, it is fitting that we do our best to relay it to others and to persuade them of its importance. Perhaps next week we can write about the RAF’s attacks on Berlin, and do another flyer on Manouchian…”

“Wait.”

They all turned at the unfamiliar voice. Grantaire, the new man brought in by Courfeyrac, was leaning towards Enjolras. He lifted an eyebrow. “Manouchian? Rayman? _Ritter?_ You all were involved with all that? With shooting the official in charge of conscripting labor throughout all of France?”

And at once, silence fell again. Unable to breathe, Jehan felt his heart pounding, loud with resentment and anger and sorrow. He did not want Grantaire—he wanted their group, les Amis de l’Avenir, back the way it was meant to be—he wanted them all safe—oh, God, he wanted this war over.

And again, Courfeyrac’s hand rested on Grantaire’s shoulder. “Oh, no,” she said, her voice light but her face dark. “That wasn’t us.”

“Not to say that we weren’t _involved_ ,” Bahorel jutted in, throwing an angry look at Courfeyrac. Jehan swallowed.

Grantaire looked from one woman to the other. “Oh, just give me a straight answer,” he said, laughing wryly under his breath.

And then at once Jehan felt a need to speak the truth. The whole truth, without hiding and trembling.

He drew in a deep breath. “The answer,” he said, “is that Feuilly—”

“The answer,” interrupted Enjolras, diplomatic and cold, “is that we are connected to those involved. Thus, involved indirectly.”

Jehan, about to protest, cut himself off when he saw the faces of those around him. For him, the mention of Feuilly’s name had been a release. Apparently, however, it was also on the verge of releasing all kinds of reactions from the others, from the very vulnerable to the rather dangerous.

“Oh,” said Grantaire, looking around uncomfortably. “I see.”

And then came a knock at the door from the outside, bringing the tension to a head. Enjolras started to get up, but Jehan shook his head at him and went himself—it was his house, after all, if this was trouble. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bahorel’s gun trained on Grantaire, and Combeferre’s ready to resist any hostile entrants.

“Who is it?” asked Jehan, his voice steadier than he felt.

“Gavroche,” came the answer, and the voice was unmistakable. “I’m looking for those leather trousers you told me ‘bout.”

The guns slid back into pockets, and Jehan let Gavroche in. He looked at their faces and raised his eyebrows.

“What’s going on, comrades?” he asked, leaning back against the wall.

“What’s going on,” said Grantaire shortly, with a tilt of his head at Bahorel, “is that I can see where I’m not wanted.” He got up, shoving his chair under the table.

“Hang on,” put in Courfeyrac, “you said you were in.”

Grantaire looked at her, and looked at Enjolras, and shuffled his feet. “I’ll…I’ll be back,” he muttered. “Here, have my address in case you need to find me.” He scribbled it down on a scrap of paper and thrust it at Courfeyrac, then turned and went out the door in something like a daze.

“He’ll have to be followed,” said Enjolras, once the door was shut behind Grantaire.

Gavroche shrugged. “I’ll go.”

Enjolras thanked him, and he slipped out as well.

Everyone breathed again.

Then Combeferre spoke up. “We all must be more careful than ever,” he said. “Communication and wariness are key now. We must trust one another, keep one another updated, keep one another safe.”

Courfeyrac shifted, looking frustrated. “We always have done our best, Combeferre,” she answered.

“But it’s even more important now,” Joly said heavily. “The work has grown more dangerous for all of us.”

Jehan bit his lip at that. None of them needed more danger, but especially not Joly, who worked amid the Gestapo themselves to provide the group with vital information.

“More dangerous,” said Enjolras, “but no less motivated by hope. Still, I am in agreement with Combeferre. We must take special precautions. Courfeyrac, this recruit can stay, but no others without prior consultation, please?”

She managed to smile a little. “Agreed there, captain.”

“Hold on,” said Bahorel forcefully. She was leaning forward in her chair, tugging at her kerchief again. “You all say it’s so much more dangerous now, but is that really true? Not to my mind. The amount of information they have on us hasn’t changed.”

Combeferre’s face tightened. “What has changed,” he said, “is that Feuilly is in prison. He is in their hands. Think, Bahorel. You’ve heard what that’s like.”

“But this is _Feuilly_ we’re talking about!” Bahorel shot at him. She stood up and started to pace, her arms swinging. “Feuilly’s strong and—and you can’t just assume he’s a traitor! He’s been with us years—we’ve gone through hell—he’ll make it!”

“None of us thinks he’s a traitor, but you can’t just assume someone will never break!” Combeferre shot back. “For God’s sake, Bahorel—”

“Bahorel,” put in Enjolras, quietly, “think of last summer. Even the simulated interrogations that we endured voluntarily were a great challenge for us all.”

Jehan felt his stomach turn violently at that, at the memories of giving and receiving beatings right here in this basement, of the bathtub and the cuffed hands and the matches, of the manipulation and the threats. 

“And those were nothing,” Joly added, half to himself. “We were damn careful with each other.”

“But none of us gave!” Bahorel’s shout echoed emptily. “None of us gave, and that was when it didn’t even matter whether we did or not! Feuilly—”

“But we were in the hands of people we trust, too,” put in Courfeyrac. Her face had gone pale at the mention of Feuilly’s imprisonment, making her lipstick seem a brighter red. “With either Combeferre or Joly watching to call it off if we were ever in medical danger, or just pushed too far, there wasn’t a lot to be afraid of. I mean, the point was to suspend our disbelief on that count, but it was always somewhere in my subconscious, reassuring me. I knew I wasn’t going to get raped; you fellows knew you weren’t going to have your balls crushed…we were able to do it because we trusted each other.”

“—While among the Gestapo, all one has to trust is oneself and one’s cause.” Enjolras put his hand on Bahorel’s shoulder. “Comrade, we all think the best of Feuilly. To believe him weak or traitorous could not be further from our minds. But he is facing a greater ordeal than any of us has ever faced, and we must do what we can to give him respite in the case that he should need it.”

She twisted away from him, jerking a chair out from under the table. Her movements grew suddenly heavy as she lowered herself into it, head in her hands. As Joly and Bossuet moved to her, Combeferre sighed gently and addressed Enjolras in a low voice:

“You know that when Feuilly joined Manouchian, he started carrying a cyanide capsule. If he’d used it, I think Joly would have heard, but—just as a precaution, do you think…?”

Enjolras held Combeferre’s gaze a moment, then glanced out across the room. Jehan, catching the import, had to swallow hard.

Combeferre was suggesting that they all carry cyanide in case of capture.

He felt his heartbeat kicking against the very idea. The thought of having to withstand torture was a terrible one, but the thought of suicide?

“…Joly carries something, does he not?” Enjolras said, as he watched Joly try to engage in conversation with Bahorel, Bossuet hovering around them and Courfeyrac sitting nearby. “He came to you once, when he thought that the risk was rapidly growing, and asked.”

“Yes,” said Combeferre. “Nine months ago now. It’s not cyanide—I got him something which looks more medical, so that it’s less immediately suspicious. He carries so many pills anyway.”

Jehan’s eyes followed Enjolras’ to Joly. Joly was prepared to kill himself for France. Joly, who looked so young with his rosy cheeks and laughed so cheerfully, who came alive more than ever when someone mentioned Musichetta and could hardly contain himself when he saw her. Joly, ready to commit suicide.

“I think,” said Enjolras, “that it would be prudent for us to do the same, yes. But each of us must make his own choice.”

“—There’s only one truly serious philosophical problem,” Jehan quoted suddenly, causing Enjolras and Combeferre to turn and look at him, “and that’s suicide. To judge whether life is or is not worth the pain of living is to respond to the fundamental question of philosophy.”

“To carry cyanide is not to use it, Jehan,” Combeferre said gently.

“But to carry it _is_ to believe you could,” he replied, biting his lip. “Even that you should. And as for myself, I—well, I cannot say that I could or should. We are the Resistance, after all; we exist through struggle against evil and darkness. Through…through defiance and through love of life, not through escape. Not through the release of death.”

“Refusing them the ability to cause us pain could be a last act of defiance,” said Enjolras, “as well as placing our knowledge forever beyond their reach. But you are right—or whomever you are quoting is right; was that Camus?—it is certainly a fundamental question, and we must take counsel with our own hearts. If you do not carry cyanide, Jehan—” and their eyes met—“then I will admire that choice, and admire your strength.”

Jehan managed a bit of a sad smile as he looked down at his hands. “I don’t know if I am strong,” he said. “I can only hope. And oh, even though we know Feuilly is strong, we can still only hope…”

He broke off, wild sequences of images flashing against his closed eyelids, and suddenly lines of poetry amidst them, working to calm him and make sense of the world. _I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope…_

Courfeyrac and Bahorel were standing up. “We’re going to go, Enjolras,” said Courfeyrac. “When’s the next meeting?”

Enjolras and Combeferre glanced at one another. “Let’s try four days from now,” Enjolras answered. “Here, seven o’clock. If we need to change that, messages will come the usual ways.”

Courfeyrac nodded, gave a smile and salute in farewell, and went off with Bahorel behind her.

“Jehan,” said Combeferre, “we should start on the pamphlet.”

“And I on the codes,” said Enjolras.

“And we should leave,” put in Bossuet, “as soon as we’ve given the girls time.”

Jehan pulled his chair up to the table where Combeferre and Enjolras sat, pulling a pencil from behind his ear and reaching for a nearby stack of paper.

“Are we going to divide the pamphlet into two sections?” he asked Combeferre. “If so, how?”

“Hmm.” Combeferre folded his hands on the table and leaned forwards. “That’d probably be best…perhaps if I write about the decree itself, in the format of a news article, and you tackle the importance of it? Like Feuilly pointed out when we were discussing this, most people won’t be overly concerned with the deportation of the Romani, but that goes directly against the ideal of equality. –No, but that’d be an unbalanced division, wouldn’t it? Something else needs to go into my section.”

Jehan strove to focus, to think of what Feuilly had said on the topic without thinking of where he was now. “Well,” he said slowly, “you could make the point of its similarity to the treatment of Jews, the disabled, and so on, those who are considered inferior, and discuss where that sense of superiority is already leading. I can invoke the history of France’s struggle for equality in order to appeal to their sense of patriotism and humanity.”

Combeferre nodded. “That should work. May I have some paper?”

Jehan passed him some, and they both began to work—Combeferre making tidy outlines, over and over until he got his points the way he wanted them; Jehan scribbling down his thoughts as they came to mind and messily connecting and emphasizing them with arrows and underlining. Enjolras was bent over a legal pad which he had taken from a hidden compartment in the table, charting out a new code with furrowed brow.

All of them, doing Feuilly’s work.

Jehan’s breath caught in his throat and he let it out in a shaky sigh, causing the other two to look up at him.

“I said to my soul,” he quoted suddenly, desperately, “be still, and wait without hope—”

“Jehan,” Combeferre interrupted, eyes widening with concern, but Jehan went on over him.

“—For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love…” He swallowed and pushed on through the passage of Eliot. “For love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith—” and he was crying, but he did not care—“But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.”

Enjolras reached out to put his hand on Jehan’s.

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought,” he finished, despite a tight sob. “So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.”

Combeferre, smiling sadly, offered Jehan a handkerchief for his tears. Jehan took it and wiped his eyes, then stared at the crumpled fabric in his hand.

“I think,” he said, “I would give for Feuilly’s safety things which he himself would never give.”

Enjolras grasped Jehan’s hand tightly, and Jehan squeezed back as though it were a lifeline. Though there was no light or dancing in this still darkness, he thought, at least there was strength.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote from Camus comes from "The Myth of Sisyphus," published 1942. The Eliot quote comes from "The Four Quartets" and specifically "East Coker," which was published separately in 1940 and with the rest of the quartets in 1943.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this work comes from French poet and Resistance member Paul Eluard's poem "Liberté", and chapter titles are from his "Les Sept Poèmes d'Amour en Guerre".
> 
> Courfeyrac and Bahorel have been genderswapped to reflect the amount of women who fought in the Resistance.


End file.
